Tl;dr: Neomedievalism in prognostics is a bundle of at least 7 interconnected megatrends in the following areas:
(1) International relations: the emergence of a network state
(2) Demography and migration: the new Great Migration
(3) Religion and ethnicity: its growing impact on political dynamics
(4) Law: the crawling emergence of legal pluralism, i.e. many legal standards on a single territory
(5) The economy: the feudalization of capitalism and neofeudal risks
(6) Technology: debilitating informtion overload and a new illiteracy
(7) Urban planning and governance : the triumpf of popular common sense over philosophical rationality.
There are many meanings of “neomedievalism” or “the New Middle Ages” circulating in the humanities. They refer to many different phenomena, and sometimes contradict each other.
However, neomedievalism in prognostics is different – it is a coherent stub of a theory of globalization, that traces phenomena characteristic for the Middle Ages in the processes reshaping civilization in 21st century.
The main thesis of neomedievalism in prognostics is that we are internationally facing the re-emergence of some processes and macrostructers typical for the era of the Middle Ages in the present times.
These processes are traceable in international relations, culture, society, economics, law and even in urbanism. Neomedievalism.net is an online resource that will give you a snapshot of essential features of integral neomedievalism – a neomedieval globalization concept in the making.
It is possible that we are now moving from neoliberalism to neomedievalism, which would mean the systemic change of political and social timespace. However, this change has not been properly described. Rather, neomedieval intuitions are scattered across many disciplines without any overarching order.
So far neomedievalism useful for prognostics has been put forward more or less openly in three disciplines of humanities – international relations, philosophy of culture and historiography. The respective proponents were Hedley Bull, Umberto Eco and American historiographers (S. G. Nichols, M. S. Brownlee et al.).
Neomedievalism in international relations is a theoretically well grounded field. This cannot be said about neomedievalism in the two other fields. So far, noone has tried to draw any links between these three neomedievalisms. Likewise, no one has tried to identify neomedieval trends in other dimensions, not to mention embedding the trends into a more holistic theoretical framework related to globalization.
Explaining the advantages of integrating many medieval trends into a neomedieval theory of globalization is the goal of this online resource.
You can also find an in-depth explanation of neomedievalism in our book “Cities in the Neomedieval Era” available for download on this site.
Read more: Key features of neomedievalism
Neomedievalism 